Cities' Improvements Are Fragile Victories

BOB HERBERT

January 2, 2001|BOB HERBERT THE NEW YORK TIMES.

In the early 1980s the producers of the made-for-TV movie The Day After needed a neighborhood suitable for filming scenes of the aftermath of a nuclear attack. No problem. They filmed at the intersection of Linwood and Prospect boulevards in Kansas City, Mo.

Over the past several decades, few things have been easier than locating inner-city neighborhoods that had literally been reduced to rubble, destroyed as if by bombing.

The South Bronx in the mid-1970s was such a nightmare of destruction that it shocked the entire nation. Airline passengers flying over the Bronx on the approach to La Guardia Airport could look out the windows and watch the fires rage. An incredible 40,000 arson fires were set in a four-year period.

As spectacular fires blazed just blocks from Yankee Stadium during the 1977 World Series, Howard Cosell told a national television audience, "There it is again, ladies and gentlemen. The Bronx is burning."

That was then. In their new book, Comeback Cities, Paul Grogan and Tony Proscio describe some of the remarkable, even miraculous, improvements that have occurred in previously devastated neighborhoods in Kansas City, New York, Chicago, Cleveland and other big cities across the country.

It's not just the downtown areas of the nation's great cities that are coming back. The ghettos, the slums, the neighborhoods that seemingly had surrendered unconditionally to rot and to fear are in the early stages of a long march back to viability.

Urban issues are among the great unmentionables in American politics and media. But some good things are happening.

Grogan and Proscio open their book by saying, "The American inner city is rebounding -- not just cosmetically, but fundamentally."

Referring to the area surrounding the intersection of Linwood and Prospect in Kansas City, they write: "Now, after more than 15 years of steady effort, the [Community Development Corporation] of Kansas City has produced two major shopping centers there, built more than 300 homes, a library, and a senior center, and in all created a bustling, thriving urban crossroad remarkable only to those who remember the wasteland that came before."

In the South Bronx, more than 10,000 new houses and apartments were built from 1988 to 1997. Crime is down dramatically. Property values and real estate tax collections have increased sharply. School attendance is up. And the widespread sense of desolation and despair, which seemed impossible to lift a quarter of a century ago, has largely given way to feelings of enthusiasm and community pride.

These are not isolated occurrences. "Essentially what has happened is that a set of trends that are usually seen as unrelated are converging to lift the fortunes of inner-city neighborhoods," said Grogan, an urban expert who is now the vice president for government, community and public affairs at Harvard.

Some of the most important factors were:

The thousands of neighborhood-based nonprofit organizations that have worked quietly but relentlessly over the past couple of decades, in cities from coast to coast, to bring together public and private resources to rebuild neighborhoods.

The return of legitimate commercial activity to many of these neighborhoods. This has been bolstered by the strong national economy of the last several years, and by the virtual revolution in commercial lending practices sparked by the federal Community Reinvestment Act.

The historic declines in crime over the past several years.

This nascent revival that is taking hold in so many inner-city neighborhoods is distressingly fragile. An economic downturn, especially one that resulted in significant losses of jobs, could be devastating. Increases in crime could wipe out the painstaking gains of many years. And an erosion of political support for the Community Reinvestment Act, which was attacked by some conservative Republicans last year, would be like a death knell.

The recent improvements in the inner cities are, at best, baby steps in a long, long march. Comeback Cities is an optimistic book. With a new, more conservative administration gearing up in Washington, it remains to be seen if that optimism can be sustained.

Write to columnist Bob Herbert at The New York Times, 229 W. 43rd St., New York, NY 10036.